5 Math Gurus Who Are Already Changing The Way We Understand Sports

But Silver comes into a sports writing field that's already
stacked with statistics-minded people. In politics, his adherence
to math and modeling made him an exceptional figure. That won't
be the case at ESPN when he chooses to write about sports.

Here are a handful of writers who are doing some Silver-type
sports writing already.

We excluded baseball writers because all baseball writing is
stats-based now:

1. Kirk Goldsberry (NBA, Grantland).
He's a "visiting scholar" at Harvard and does a lot of cool data
visualization stuff with basketball shot charts — showing where
players take most of their shots, and how efficient they are from
different areas on the court.

2. Kevin Pelton (NBA, Pro Basketball
Prospectus and ESPN). He took over at ESPN for John
Hollinger — who invented ESPN's influential PER stat — after the
Grizzlies poached him. Pelton co-wrote the 2012-13 Pro Basketball
Prospectus, which included win-loss projections for every team
and player based on past performance and historical anecdotes.

4. Aaron Schatz (NFL,
Football Outsiders). Schatz has combined game
charting, predictive models, and an advanced stats rating system
to form the best NFL statistics resource around with Football
Outsiders.

His DVOA rating calculates a team's efficiency relative to the
league average, and it's an invaluable resource for comparing
teams and match-ups.